'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Fredy Perlman - Ten Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats (1977)

NB:I first posted this in 2013, along with Perlman's essay on nationalism. I post it again here, in its entirety. It seems appropriate to remind ourselves that this is a very old malaise - DSWritten: 1977; First Published: 1977 Source: Red & Black Detroit Public Domain: Perlman Internet Archive 2006. This work has always beencompletely freeThe Egocrat does not express his longing for community
and communication in practice; he transforms it into a Thought. Armed with this
Thought, he is still mute and powerless, but is no longer like everyone else:
he is Conscious, he possesses the Idea. To confirm his difference, to make sure
he's not deluding himself, he needs to be seen as different by others - those
others who confirm that he is truly a possessor of the Thought .

The Egocrat finds "community" and "communication," not by
smashing the elements of the spectacle in his reach, but by surrounding himself
with like-minded individuals, other Egos, who reflect the Golden Thought to
each other and confirm each other's validity as possessors of it. Chosen
People. At this point the Thought, if it is to remain golden, must evermore
remain the same: unsullied and uncompromised; criticism and revision are
synonyms of betrayal, "Thus it can only exist as a polemic with reality.
It refutes everything. It can survive only by freezing, by becoming increasingly
totalitarian." (Camatte) Therefore, in order to continue to reflect and
confirm the Thought, the individual must stop thinking...

The Egocrat - Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Kim Ii Sung - is not an
accident or an aberration or an irruption of irrationality; he is a
personification of the relations of the existing social order.

II

The Egocrat is initially an individual, like everyone else:
mute and powerless in this society without community or communication, victim­ized
by the spectacle, "the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about
itself, its laudatory monologue, the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its
totalitarian management of the conditions of existence." (Debord) Repelled
by the spectacle, he longs for "the liberated human being, a being who is
at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen." (Camatte) If his longing were
expressed in practice: at his workplace, in the street, wherever the spectacle
robs him of his humanity, he would become a rebel.

III

The Egocrat does not express his longing for community and
communication in practice; he transforms it into a Thought. Armed with this
Thought, he is still mute and powerless, but is no longer like everyone else:
he is Conscious, he possesses the Idea. To confirm his difference, to make sure
he's not deluding himself, he needs to be seen as different by others - those others
who confirm that he is truly a possessor of the Thought

IV

The Egocrat finds "community" and
"communication," not by smashing the elements of the spectacle in his
reach, but by surrounding himself with like-minded individuals, other Egos, who
reflect the Golden Thought to each other and confirm each other's validity as
possessors of it. Chosen People. At this point the Thought, if it is to remain
golden, must evermore remain the same: unsullied and uncompromised; criticism
and revision are synonyms of betrayal, "Thus it can only exist as a
polemic with reality. It refutes everything. It can survive only by freezing,
by becoming increasingly totalitarian." (Camatte) Therefore, in order to
continue to reflect and confirm the Thought, the individual must stop thinking.

V

The initial goal, the "liberated human being," is
lost to practice when it is relegated to the Egocrat's consciousness, because
"consciousness makes itself the goal and reifies itself in an organization
which comes to incarnate the goal." (Camatte) The group of mutual admirers
acquires a schedule and a meeting place; it becomes an institution. The
organization, which takes the form of a Bolshevik or Nazi cell, a Socialist
reading club, or an Anarchist affinity group, depending on local circumstances
and individual preferences, "provides a terrain favorable to informal
domina­tion by propagandists and defenders of their ideology, specialists who
are in general more mediocre the more their intellectual activity consists of
the repetition of certain definitive truths. Ideological respect for unanim­ity
of decision has on the whole been favorable to the uncontrolled authority,
within the organization itself, of specialists in freedom" (wrote Debord,
describing anarchist organizations). Rejecting the ruling spectacle
ideologically, the organization of specialists in freedom reproduces the
relation of the spectacle in its internal practice.

VI

The organization incarnating the Thought turns on the world,
because "the project of this consciousness is to frame reality with its
concept." (Camatte) The group becomes militant. It sets out to extend to
society at large the organization's internal relations, one variant of which
can be summarized as follows: "Within the party, there must be no one
lagging behind when an order is given by the leadership to 'march forward,' no
one turning right when the order is 'left.' "(- a revolutionary leader,
quoted by M. Velli.) At this point the specific content of the Thought is as
irrelevant to practice as the geography of the Christian paradise, because the
goal is reduced to a cudgel: it serves as the justification for the group's
repressive practices, and as an instrument of blackmail. (Examples: "To
deviate from socialist ideology in the slight­est degree means strengthening
bourgeois ideology." Lenin, quoted by M. Velli; "When 'libertarians'
slanderously trash others, I question their maturity and commitment to
revolutionary social change" an 'anarchist' in a letter to The Fifth
Estate.)

VII

The militant organization extends itself by means of
conversion and manipulation. Conversion is the favored technique of early
Bolshevism and missionary anarchism: the militant's explicit task is to
introduce consciousness into the working class (Lenin), to "reach working people
with our ideas" (an "anarchist" in "The Red Menace,"
Toronto). But the militant's implicit task, and the practical outcome of his
activity, is to affect the practice of the workers, not their thought. The
conversion is successful if workers, whatever their ideas, pay dues to the
organization and obey the organization's calls to action (strikes,
demonstrations, etc.). The Egocrat's implicit aim is to establish his (and his
organization's) hegemony over a large number of individuals, to become the
leader of a mass of followers.

This implicit aim becomes cynically explicit
when the militants are Nazis or Stalinists (or an amalgam of the two, such as
the US Labor Party). Conversion gives way to manipulation, outright lying. In
this model, the recruitment of followers is the explicit aim, and the Idea
ceases to be a fixed star, perfect and immutable; the Idea becomes a mere means
toward the explicit aim; whatever recruits most followers is a good Idea; the
Idea becomes a cynically constructed collage based on the fears and hatreds of
potential followers; its main promise is the annihilation of scapegoats:
"counter-revolutionaries," "anarchists," "CIA
agents," "Jews," etc. The difference between manipulators and
missionaries is theoretical; in practice, they are contemporaries competing in
the same social field, and they borrow each other's techniques.

VIII

In order to broadcast the Idea, so as to convert or
manipulate, the Egocrat needs instruments, media, and it is precisely such
media that the society of the spectacle provides in profusion. One
justification for turning to these media runs as follows: "The media are
currently a monopoly of the ruling classes who divert them for their own
benefit. But their structure remains 'fundamentally egalitarian,' and it is up
to revolutionary practice to bring out this potentiality contained by them but
perverted by the capitalist order. In a word, to liberate them..." (a
position paraphrased by Baudrillard.) The initial rejection of the spectacle,
the longing for community and communication, has been replaced by the longing
to exert power over the very instruments that annihilate commu­nity and
communication.

Hesitation, or a sudden outburst of critique, are ruled out by
organizational blackmail: "The Leninists will win unless we ourselves
accept the responsibility of fighting to win...," ("The Red
Menace." A Stalinist would say, "The Trotskyists will win...,"
etc.) From this point on, anything goes; all means are good if they lead to the
goal; and at the absurd outer limit, even sales promotion and advertising, the
activity and language of Capital itself, become justified revolutionary means:
"We concentrate heavily on distribution and promotion...Our promotional
work is wide-ranging and expensive. It includes advertising widely, promotional
mailings, catalogues, display tables across the country, etc.

All of this costs
a tremendous amount of money and energy, which is covered by the money
generated from the sale of books." (- An "anarchist businessman"
in a letter to The Fifth Estate.) Is this anarchist businessman a ludicrous
example, because so ridiculously exaggerated, or is he solidly within the
orthodox tradition of organized militancy? "The big banks are the 'state
apparatus' which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready made
from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically
mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it EVEN BIGGER, even more
democratic, even more compre­hensive..." (Lenin, quoted by M. Velli.)

IX

For the Egocrat, the media are mere means; the goal is
hegemony, power, and the power of the secret police. "Invisible pilots in
the center of the popular storm, we must direct it, not with a visible power,
but with the collective dictatorship of all the allies. A dictatorship without
a badge, without title, without official right, yet all the more powerful
because it will have none of the appearances of power." (Bakunin, quoted
by Debord) The collective dictatorship of all quickly becomes the rule of the single
Egocrat because, "if all the bureaucrats taken together decide everything,
the cohesion of their own class can be assured only by the concentration of
their terrorist power in a single person." (Debord) With the success of
the Egocrat's enterprise, the establishment of the "dictator­ship without
official right," communication is not only absent on a social scale; every
local attempt is deliberately liquidated by the police.

This situation is not a
"deformation" of the organization's initially "pure goals";
it is already prefigured in the means, the "fundamentally egalitar­ian"
instruments used for the victory. "What characterizes the mass media is
the fact that they are anti-mediators, intransitives, the fact that they
produce non-communication... Television, by its presence alone, is social
control in the home. It is not necessary to imagine this control as the
regime's periscope spying on the private life of everyone, because television
is already better than that: it assures that people no longer talk to each
other, that they are definitively isolated in the face of statements without
response." (Baudiillard)

X

The Egocrat's project is superfluous. The capitalist media
of production and communication already reduce human beings to mute and
powerless spectators, passive victims continually subjected to the existing
order's "laudatory monologue." The anti-totalitarian revolution
requires, not another medium, but the liquidation of all media, "the
liquidation of their entire present structure, functional as well as technical,
of their operational form so to speak, which everywhere reflects their social
form. At the limit, obviously, it is the very concept of medium which
disappears and must disappear: the exchanged word, reciprocal and symbolic
exchange, negates the notion and function of medium, of intermediary...
Reciprocity comes about by way of the destruction of the medium."
(Baudrillard)